Google beta-released version 4 of its MSIE Toolbar yesterday. New features include:

Customized buttons that allow you to search your favorite site directly from anywhere online. Web site owners can also create custom buttons to share with visitors.

An enhanced search box that uses your personal search history and the most popular search items to suggest searches as you type.

Bookmarks that can be accessed on any machine.

Send to that allows the viewed webpage to be sent to a gmail contact or a blog on blogger.
All of the above features are available via a sign-in feature. Additionally, PC Magazine’s review of the new toolbar was impressed with the user-favoring privacy controls that usually default as "share info disabled" and provide easy access.

It suprises me that Google’s custom buttons only work in IE considering how hard Google is promoting Firefox. It’s been awhile since I’ve used IE but I decided to drag it out to play with customized buttons. I’ve created a OmniNerd button…now if only I could port it to Firefox somehow.

First, a big thanks to Tom Tolman for writing the code for this. For all of you toolbar users, here’s the link to add the OmniNerd button, or if you prefer, the raw XML. If you run into any bugs or can’t get it to work, let me know in this thread.